SF’s lost opportunity to be reborn as ‘Paris, with hills’

One of a handful of surviving copies of Daniel Burnham’s early 20th century blueprint for redoing San Francisco. It is housed at the San Francisco Public Library.

One of a handful of surviving copies of Daniel Burnham’s early 20th century blueprint for redoing San Francisco. It is housed at the San Francisco Public Library.

Photo: Mark Costantini/San Francisco Ch

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Daniel Burnham, in a photo taken around 1910.

Daniel Burnham, in a photo taken around 1910.

Photo: Chronicle File

SF’s lost opportunity to be reborn as ‘Paris, with hills’

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In the last decade of the 19th century, San Franciscans were fed up with the physical condition of their city. Parks were neglected, and schools were falling apart. The shopping district had become so decrepit that merchants were hiring workers to repair the streets.

The city’s architecture also came in for harsh criticism. The manager of the St. Francis Hotel, Allan Pollock, spoke for many when he blasted the city’s ubiquitous, ornate Victorians as “hideous in design and flimsy in finish — architectural shams of lumber and paint.” The downtown was cluttered, and the outer districts were filled with nearly identical buildings, the monotonous result of building associations that bought up large tracts of land and built cookie-cutter houses. As Harold Gilliam writes in “The San Francisco Experience,” “By the turn of the century, some leading citizens had begun to realize that man-made San Francisco was an ugly city.”

Foremost among those citizens was James Phelan. When he became mayor in 1897, the cultured, classically educated Phelan appointed a committee to look into beautifying the city. Nothing came of that effort, but in 1904, Phelan — now a private citizen — became head of a new group, the Committee for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco. He invited famed architect and city planner Daniel Burnham to draw up a plan to transform the entire city.

Burnham was the nation’s most respected city planner. He had gained fame as the creator of the “White City,” a Beaux Arts-style miniature metropolis that was the centerpiece of the influential 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Burnham was a leading exponent of the City Beautiful movement, which held that grand, classically inspired architecture and harmonious public spaces would not only replace tenements and slums but also morally uplift the masses.

Burnham once famously said, “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized.” Inspired by the opportunity to remake the eighth-largest city in the country, he accepted Phelan’s invitation and arrived in San Francisco in 1904.

What he came up with was breathtakingly ambitious. As former San Francisco Planning Director James McCarthy wrote in 1972, “His plan for San Francisco looks like Paris, with hills.”

Burnham called for replacing much of the street grid with a grand series of radial boulevards intersected by wide diagonal streets, with European-style open spaces punctuating the places where they came together. Contoured streets would replace the gridiron on Telegraph and other hills. The heart of the city, centered on Van Ness Avenue and Market Street, would be the Civic Center, with concentric circles of government buildings, concert halls, museums and libraries, along with “shopping of the finer order.” Offering access to this majestic area from the west would be an extended Panhandle, running all the way from Golden Gate Park to Market.

The most dramatic of Burnham’s proposed new roads was a 30-mile-long Outer Boulevard that would encircle the city, starting from Market and running above the Embarcadero and past Fisherman’s Wharf. To our modern eyes the Outer Boulevard, “elevated above the warehouses,” sounds suspiciously like the late, unlamented Embarcadero Freeway. But Burnham seems to have envisioned it as more like the High Line, the elevated linear park on Manhattan’s West Side.

Deeming the 1,400 acres of parkland in the city inadequate, Burnham proposed creating a vast open space around Lake Merced that would extend all the way to Twin Peaks, and form part of a “chain of parks girdling the city.” Twin Peaks itself would be not just a park, but “a center for great public fetes in which the natural beauties of city and county would be the chief attraction.”

High atop the central hills would be an Athenaeum consisting of “courts, terraces and colonnaded shelters ... arranged after the manner of the great Poecile of the Villa Hadrian.” The “principal monument” of the city would be placed in this spot, “the moral and geographical center of the city. It would take the form of a colossal figure symbolical of San Francisco.”

If the Athenaeum did not provide sufficient moral uplift, citizens could walk into upper Cole Valley, where a vast natural amphitheater would occupy the area bounded by Clayton and Stanyan streets and Clarendon and Parnassus avenues. “This amphitheater would recall by its location the stadium in the hills at Delphi, which overlooks the Gulf of Corinth, and the theater of Dionysus, at the foot of the Acropolis,” Burnham wrote.

Some of Burnham’s proposals would never have worked in the age of the automobile, but many were remarkably prescient. For example, he called for a subway system, a vehicle-free Financial District and one-way streets downtown. Unfortunately, only the one-way streets were adopted at the time — it would be nearly 70 years before a subway would run beneath Market.

Burnham presented his report at a banquet at the St. Francis Hotel in September 1905 to an enthusiastic reception. The Board of Supervisors appropriated money to print 3,000 copies of the lavish report, complete with drawings and photographs. The books were printed, delivered to City Hall and awaiting distribution on April 18, 1906, when the earthquake destroyed the shoddily built structure and buried nearly every copy. Only a few volumes, which had been distributed to members of the sponsoring committee, survived.

At first, it appeared that the destruction of the city had paved, or unpaved, the way for Burnham’s plan to be implemented: San Francisco was now a tabula rasa. But merchants, real estate interests and the press were more concerned with getting the city up and working again quickly than with trying to rebuild it as a combination of ancient Babylon, Paris and Athens. Most of Burnham’s plan was never implemented.

But some of it was. The city’s grand Beaux Arts Civic Center is a direct result of Burnham’s vision. Park Presidio Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard and the various contoured roads throughout the city reflect his plan.

And one of the city’s best-loved public spaces, the summit of Telegraph Hill, has Burnham’s fingerprints all over it. As McCarthy writes, “The contoured Telegraph Hill Boulevard, the flat circle at the top, and the dominant tower all follow the spirit of the plan and its principle that the tops of hills should be preserved for public access and open space.”

Daniel Burnham did not succeed in remaking the entire city. But his plan left an enduring, and salutary, mark on it.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com

Trivia time

Previous trivia question: What was a “crimp”?

Answer: A 19th century waterfront hustler who lured unwitting arriving sailors into disreputable boardinghouses, from which they were often shanghaied.

This week’s trivia question: Where does the Salesforce Tower rank in height among U.S. buildings?

Editor’s note

Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past tells those stories, using a specific location to illuminate the city’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday, alternating with Peter Hartlaub’s Our San Francisco.